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Saturday, March 2, 2013

Zen Huna: Enlightenment Lessons of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

True, I don’t normally watch a movie like Sharkboy and Lavagirl, but like Spy Kids, things about it caught my
attention for their Buddhist significance as my roommate watched it in our
dorm.The movie revolves around a boy
named Max who invents a dream world which he records in his dream journal.One day, after a particularly bad day of
school, people from his dream world, Sharkboy and Lavagirl, find him at school
and take him his dream world.

“Life is but a dream.”

Buddhists have
sayings, “Life is a dream,” “Reality is an illusion.”This is often taken to mean that whatever’s
going on isn’t real.We’ve just created
it with our minds and not being able to get out of it is a sign of
weakness.This is not true.On the contrary, Buddhist really believe
something more like this, “A dream is reality.”The problem is the differences between Western and Buddhist languages,
such as Pali, Chinese, or Tibetan.When
I took Exploring World Religions, Eastern Civilization, and Religions of the
East at Johnson County Community College all with the same teacher summed up
the worldview of the Chinese, “Experience vs. Order.”The way these languages work I guess is that
the category something belongs in doesn’t precede the thing itself.For example, saying, “I am tall,” is
basically the same thing as saying, “Tall is me.”

Buddhists don’t believe reality is an illusion.Rather something starts as an illusion and becomes reality.A Buddhist saying states that, “With our
minds, we create the world.”Take a
child who’s been told for years that he will misbehave by his parents and he
later does.Children learn from elders.

Another example would be the process of creative
visualization made popular in the West by writer Shakti Gawain.One simply visualizes something happening for
it to take place.The theory being is
that it trains people to do the things that cause these things to happen.Celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Will Smith,
and Jim Carrey stated they have all used visualization to help them achieve
their goals.Will Smith imagined no
longer living in poverty and that became a reality with his film and television
successes.Jim Carrey stated once that
in 1994, he wrote a check to himself for “services in acting.”In 1995, he received that amount of money he
wrote to himself for starring in the movie Dumb
and Dumber.

The world we inhabit is more or less a product of our minds.Saying this, it should be noted that it does
not mean it is the product we intended.But what goes on in the world is more or
less a product of what our mind has believed.When we fear the results of our tests, they may turn out to be
unsatisfactory.We may think we’re going
to find love, but really we’re only doing it because we think if we don’t,
we’ll be miserable, and often times we are.An Eastern axiom states that the world is a projection.Take a social worker whose performance is
called unsatisfactory and the social worker believes him and she takes it to be
a remark about her personally.She may
not be the one who called herself that in the first place, but in believing so,
she considers her critic to be making her feel unhappy with her performance,
when really the only one making her feel so unhappy with herself is her.Maybe she reacted that way because she is unhappy with herself.Be defining herself as a social worker, her
feelings of how other’s perceive her are based on how they see her doing her
job.Without this view of herself that
she has created, no coworkers comment could be able to hurt her so much inside.